Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Menino

Menino’s sentence reads like a victory lap, but it’s also a quiet piece of political engineering: claim the past, define the problem, and lock in a legacy. The phrase “we introduced” folds an entire civic apparatus into a single, managerial “we,” casting public safety not as a messy collision of poverty, guns, and distrust, but as a solvable governance project. It’s less poetry than a performance of competence.

The subtext is aimed at two audiences at once. To residents who lived through early-’90s fear, “reversed the tide” offers a moral relief narrative: crime wasn’t just reduced; it was beaten back, like weather. That metaphor matters. Tides sound natural, inevitable, beyond any one person’s control. If you can reverse one, you’re not merely effective; you’re almost providential. To national observers, “established a national model” turns Boston from a case study into a brand. It’s exportable governance, a city selling policy as proof of seriousness.

Context sharpens the intent. “Community policing” arrived during the era of “broken windows” thinking and aggressive quality-of-life enforcement, and in Boston it sits alongside the story of the “Boston Miracle,” youth-violence interventions, and shifting demographics. Menino smooths those competing explanations into a single causal chain that flatters the administration. The line also sidesteps the harder question that haunts all policing success stories: what was the trade-off? Claiming the model implies not just that it worked, but that it deserves replication, even as community policing in practice can slide from partnership to surveillance depending on who is being “policed” and who gets to feel like the “community.”